The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945Barbican Art Gallery, London 23 March–25 June 2017

When reviewing, in these pages, the 2015 exhibition The World of Charles and Ray Eames at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, I observed how the building's heavy, windowless gallery had been imbued with some of the sunlight of Southern California.1 In the recent exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945, curated by Florence Ostende and designed by Lucy Styles, the re-creation by Ryue Nishizawa (the N in SANAA) of his Moriyama House in Tokyo (2005) made the defamiliarization of the gallery almost complete.

Architecture and life started afresh in Japan after 1945 and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In architecture, this was demonstrated by the rejection of both teikan yōshiki, the Imperial Crown style that recalled the great disaster of the war, and Western modernism, which was the architecture of the conqueror. In their place, Kenzō Tange promoted the zakuri style of the imperial villa at Katsura, while Seiichi Shirai turned to the minka, the vernacular farmhouse architecture that stretched back to the ancient Jōmon period. Both themes reoccurred in photographs, drawings, and the occasional installation throughout the exhibition. More difficult to identify was “life,” a concept characterized at the beginning of the exhibition by the films of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, which …

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